Over the previous few years, Oakland-based experimental digital folks artist Kathryn Mohr has change into one thing of a grasp in harnessing emotions of intense discomfort, infusing her grim synthesizer compositions with a lingering, impressionistic gloom. If 2022’s Holly EP was wispy, closely influenced by the gauzy melancholy of its producer, Mohr’s Flenser labelmate Midwife, then her new album, Ready Room, permits jarring dissonance to metastasize right into a vivid, usually graphic meditation on ache. A bone-sharp train in trying down the barrel, Ready Room considers what one can do within the face of abject horror: In keeping with Mohr, stare it down. Succumb to it. Because the album’s opening line places it, “This consolation is dangerous on your well being.”
Written throughout a artistic residency at an deserted Icelandic fish manufacturing facility, Ready Room has a particular filmic high quality. One simply visualizes the isolation; subject recordings of Mohr’s personal explorations of the world render the environment extra desolate than ever. Wind howls and waves crash by way of layered, reverbed vocals and stark instrumentals, however analog synthesizers and pure phenomena usually change into frighteningly indistinguishable. The pure and the commercial collide in a approach that feels uncanny, even haunted; there’s a dread within the low background whirr of manufacturing facility mechanics, within the ghostly automated messaging that skips and repeats as if possessed. The spareness of the lyricism solely amplifies the album’s feeling of solitude, evoking tales by way of indirect, terse recollections of worry and violence. Even on “Petrified,” the sweetest-sounding observe, an unease seeps by way of Mohr’s lilting, guitar-driven melody as she coos gently about bodily decay and animal torture.
Mohr’s earlier work spanned spectral atmosphere, menacing synthesizer-and-field-recording items, and distorted, bass-driven melodies. Ready Room integrates every sort of sound into one thing new, merging darkish and lightweight with out diluting both ingredient. On the album’s first single, “Pushed,” she imbues wordless vocal fragments with heavy reverb, interspersing echoing gasps and whispers over a deep, eddying bassline. Atop a crackling drone on “Horizonless,” she stretches every horrific revelation so skinny as to change into nearly unintelligible, save for a devastated whisper: “You guessed it.” All through Ready Room, the distinction between Mohr’s sinister manufacturing and surprisingly light vocals bridges the eerie and the elegant, recalling Grouper by the use of Maria BC, and even Julianna Barwick. The music feels uncomfortably clear, all-encompassing, almost paranormal.
On the floor, the album is delicate; on first impression, one would possibly take it as an announcement of resignation. However all through Ready Room there’s a rigidity that makes the music come off fiercely aggrieved: a confrontation all of the extra unnerving for its quiet, ticking-time-bomb depth. On “Take It,” the album’s melodically smoothest and vocally clearest music, Mohr’s jaded drawl belies viciousness: “A knife for carving, not for caring—yeah, what a fairytale.” On “Elevator,” one other standout, she lastly explodes, cranking up the blood-soaked injustices of PJ Harvey’s Is This Need over blown-out, rasping guitar. As she narrates the second when somebody leaves her arm trapped to be torn off by an elevator door, Mohr refuses to render the scene any much less agonizing. Pleading for mercy or an opportunity to rewind, she forces her assailant to reckon with their very own cruelty: “I do know you’re me,” she seethes, “you actually like what you see.” Agony is not any much less actual than the chilling vindication of bearing witness to its trigger; if somebody maims you, Mohr appears to say, you might as properly bleed throughout them.
